


Breakfast in Bed

by Truth



Category: Singin' in the Rain (1952)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-29
Updated: 2010-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-14 05:24:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/145831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Truth/pseuds/Truth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cosmo gave him a suspicious look.  The gleam was certainly there, the one that always meant trouble.  Amusing trouble, if he cared to be honest with himself, but trouble all the same.  On the other hand, Don was also wearing his ‘responsible’ look, which was far rarer than the other and they might, just possibly, cancel each other out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breakfast in Bed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [id_ten_it](https://archiveofourown.org/users/id_ten_it/gifts).



Vaudeville was all about the shine of the footlights, the ability to make an audience laugh or shout with alarm. It gave a perceived glamour to the man on the stage, even if that glamour was somewhat marred by the cream pie he’d just received to the kisser.

“If I had a pie like that,” Don began, ready to begin his evening’s critique of their fellow performers.

“If you had a pie like that, we’d’ve eaten it,” Cosmo pointed out, peering over his partner’s shoulder at the stage. “I’m so hungry I could eat your hat. I wonder if there’s any mustard about?”

“Eat your own hat,” Don retorted, lowering his voice somewhat at a glare from the nearby stage manager. “Tonight’s not going to pay enough for replacement haberdashery.”

“It’d better at least pay for dinner,” Cosmo said. He gave Don a mournful look. “Or you could charm some young ladies into paying for dinner.”

“Because charming young ladies so often seek the company of penniless vaudvillains.”

“… I don’t think that word means what you think it means.” Cosmo was trying very hard not to laugh, and obviously about to lose the battle. “Accurate as it may be.”

“You know what I –“

“You two, with the fiddles. Go!”

Don bolted from the wings, violin in hand. Cosmo raced after him, managing to gain the stage just as the curtain went up. Their act had been performed so often by now that the song and dance was as smooth as if they’d been doing it for years instead of just a few months. They received a fair amount of applause, but some practiced squinting over the footlights revealed that the house was far from packed.

"Just enough for dinner and a ticket to the next town – if we’re lucky."

Don took care of costumes and some of the footwork Cosmo handled the music, the pratfalls and their accounts.

“If you can call this miserable handful of pennies ‘accounts’.” Cosmo sighed, looking down at three dollar bills and the small pile of change piled on their very narrow bed. “Maybe we should head south. We could sleep outdoors, save a little cash.”

“Spend all that cash on bail when we’re picked up for vagrancy and be back at square one.” Don had just finished tucking away the suits they wore on stage. He turned to look down at the money on the bed. “Will that be enough to get us on the train?”

“It’ll have to be,” Cosmo said. He sighed, attempting to distract himself from the prospect of missing yet another meal by building a small house out of the wrinkled dollar bills. “We can do better than this, Don. I know we can.”

“It’s not a matter of talent,” Don said. “There were two acts last night that made even us look bad – and yet they’re living the same life we are, living out of suitcases and scrabbling for money.”

“I’ve got the talent, you’ve got the looks – let’s call the whole thing off.” Cosmo brought his hand down on the rickety bed with enough force to send the coins in every direction. He managed to snatch several out of the air, but his heart wasn’t in it, and he watched the rest roll across the floor with amused resignation.

“Aw, come on, Cos.” Don dropped onto the bed, sending the rest of the money every which way. “We’ll get somewhere.”

“Straight to the poorhouse, all expenses paid.” Cosmo began retrieving the coins. He hadn’t far to go. The room was just big enough for the two of them, their luggage and the bed. He ended up halfway beneath the bed, grumbling about dust and grime and possibly the bubonic plague.

Long practice let Don know the exact moment he could stop listening to Cosmo’s grumbling. They'd been working together professionally for months, but sometimes it felt as though they'd been on the road their entire lives. It wasn't all that different from their life before, really, except now they were on their own. “How much money do we have? Total, I mean?”

“Less than the Rockefellers but more than the little match girl.” Cosmo emerged from beneath the bed, liberally coated with dust.

“Minus ten cents for a bath,” Don told him. “If we put all of it and I don’t mean just what we earned this week I mean _all_ of it, into a train ticket… how far could we get?”

Cosmo gave him a wary look. “You have that gleam in your eye, Don. You know how I feel about that.”

“Come on, Cos. How far?”

“No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” Don propped himself up on his elbows and raised an eyebrow.

“I mean ‘no’. Whatever half-baked idea you’ve come up with this time, I want no part of it. Remember that thing with the knife-throwing act and the pretty girl who turned out to be married to the man with all the sharp knives and the impressive aim? Remember the time with the bright idea to hook up with a traveling orchestra – without telling me that you volunteered me to play tuba? Remember –"

“Cosmo, I’m serious. How far?”

Cosmo gave him a suspicious look. The gleam was certainly there, the one that always meant trouble. Amusing trouble, if he cared to be honest with himself, but trouble all the same. On the other hand, Don was also wearing his ‘responsible’ look, which was far rarer than the other and they might, just possibly, cancel each other out.

“Nevada. Maybe.”

“We could make good money in Las Vegas,” Don said.

“A couple of second-rate hoofers like us? The place is lousy with entertainers.” Cosmo paused, making a thoughtful sound. “Then again –"

“I can sing, you can play piano. We could at least make enough money to keep us going for a while.” Don was coaxing now, and Cosmo shot him a suspicious look. It sounded so reasonable on the surface – but then, that was the danger with Don. _All_ of his ideas sounded reasonable.

“Okay. Las Vegas it is.” Cosmo tried to ignore Don’s delighted smile, concentrating on making sure he’d found all their money. “Hold my calls. I’ll be in the bath.”

**

Cosmo had been right; Las Vegas was fairly slim pickings. They made enough off filling in for missing acts to buy them each a nice suit. The right clothes and Don’s smiling face and engaging manner got them a long-term gig as a lounge act. Cosmo played simple, pretty music and Don crooned and life wasn’t bad.

They stuck to the cheap rooms and cheap food as much as possible. Money wasn’t so easy to come by for entertainers in a town where people were seeking a sure thing and spending every last dime on one last, desperate wager. They stuck together, kept away from the tables and worked themselves hard.

It was Don’s idea to try their hand at a little acting and Cosmo, without asking enough questions, agreed to the idea.

“It was a good idea!”

Cosmo refused to look at Don, nose in the air, arms folded.

“Cosmo… it _was_ a good idea.”

“Until you got married.”

Don winced. Neither of them had been prepared for that, but Cosmo had taken the entire business fairly hard. “Until I – I got that annulled! How was I to know the ‘acting’ job was just a set-up! Some people are just – "

“I said they were up to something. I said –"

“I got a hundred dollars – and that’s what’s left after paying for the furniture she smashed, the window she broke _and_ the annulment.” Don paused, waiting for that to sink in.

Cosmo was very still. “A hundred dollars? A _real_ hundred dollars?”

“A real hundred dollars.” Don broke into a wide, relieved grin. “And I’m not even married.”

“The honeymoon’s on you, gorgeous,” Cosmo said. He seemed to be losing his grip on his bad mood. “With the understanding that we’ll never, ever do _that_ again. What next?”

“Well… we might want to be on the next train out of town.”

Cosmo’s frown returned. “Wait, what?”

“Considering the annulment and the fact that I told her who hired me, I think it might be best –"

“There are no words for how much I hate you right now.”

“There’s a train heading west in ten minutes – and I had our suitcases taken to the station.”

“I might hate you a little less. Just a little. If they catch us, I’m going to claim that you swindled me out of my life savings and ask them to make you _suffer_ , instead of letting them kill you outright.”

“Taxi!”

**

Hollywood was not at all what either of them had been expecting. Vaudeville was about flash and color and noise, old jokes and tumbling tricks, a circus tamed for the stage. It was hard work and sweat and everything coming out perfect the first time – or dodging projectiles and not getting paid.

They found work here and there, but pickings were slim in a town where every dancer could also juggle, sing and possibly work a magic act. They split up every morning, hitting the talent agencies, asking at the various clubs and checking all the job listings. There were plenty of listings, but landing one long-term was proving difficult.

“I got a job.”

“You what?” Don stared at Cosmo, trying unsuccessfully to hide a stab of hurt. It was never ‘I got a job’. It was ‘I got us a job’ or ‘I found us work’ or something else with an ‘us’ in it.

Cosmo refused to meet his eyes. “We need to eat, Don. I’m playing for one of the smaller theatres. Just playing the organ, but it’s a steady job and –"

“And what?” Don sat down heavily on their narrow bed, one that could’ve been twin to any of the others over their somewhat checkered career.

“And I can afford a bigger place. For us,” Cosmo said. He bit his lip. “Maybe an actual apartment instead of just a room – and regular meals, for a change. I mean, skinny’s a good look on you, but …”

Don glared at him. “Fine.”

“Fine?”

“Fine!”

It was impossible to sleep on such a narrow bed without being aware of a second occupant, and even then, Cosmo wouldn’t have been able to sleep through Don’s dressing and departure. It didn’t make him happy, but it didn’t surprise him either.

They’d been an _us_ for years, through thick and thin, whether welcomed to a town or run out of it. It had always been us. Don wasn’t used to pulling a solo act. He'd never _done_ a solo act, unlike Cosmo. Cosmo _knew_ about the jobs Don had turned down because they’d only been looking for one man.

Money was tight enough now that they were both skipping meals and "us" or not, Cosmo couldn’t stand it anymore. They had to eat. He’d dig ditches if he had to, but he couldn’t let Don’s idiotic loyalty starve him to death.

Don was gone all day. Cosmo had to go to work in the evening and didn’t arrive back at the tiny room until late. Don hadn’t returned, and Cosmo curled up to sleep alone for the first time in a very long time. Such a narrow bed shouldn’t feel empty, but logic had never been one of Cosmo’s strong points when it came to emotion.

Something he and Don had in common.

Cosmo woke to the smell of coffee and something that just had to be bacon. Fairly certain that he was still dreaming, he opened his eyes.

“Breakfast?”

Don was sitting on the edge of the bed, a huge plate of scrambled eggs and bacon across his knees and an entire pot of coffee resting on their tiny, rickety dresser.

Cosmo didn’t hesitate, didn’t ask a single question, instead reaching for the fork balanced on the edge of the plate. When they’d worked their way down to polishing the pattern on the plate, the last of the coffee long gone, Cosmo sighed.

“What did you do?”

“One of the agencies asked me to act.” It was Don’s turn not to meet Cosmo’s eyes. “So I said yes.”

Cosmo could read Don like nobody else on this earth, and it didn’t take much to figure out what this was about. “And how long ago did they offer you this job?”

“The fourth.”

“Of which month?”

Don winced. “October?”

There was a long pause. The single thin pillow was brought against the back of Don’s head with impressive force. “You mean we could’ve been sleeping somewhere with rats _smaller_ than my favorite hat? For a month and a half?”

There was no real anger behind the words, for all that Cosmo was strongly torn between the desire to strangle Don or hug him. Don wouldn’t have accepted a job that wasn’t offered to Cosmo and, of the two of them, Don had the right look.

“You’re trying to make me feel guilty, aren’t you?” Cosmo gave into temptation and hugged Don, ignoring his squawk and attempts to keep from dropping the heavy plate still resting on his knees. “I wasn’t trying to desert you, Don. You know that.”

“Yeah… but you’re right. Now we can afford a better place.” Don wrinkled his nose as he carefully pried himself free of Cosmo’s embrace. “With smaller rats.”

“Hah. If you start making big money, I demand that we upgrade to mice.” Cosmo pulled himself out of bed and grinned down at Don. “Nothing but the best for us.”

Don grinned up at him, pleased that everything was right between them. “Nothing but the best.”

**

“You _what_?”

Don winced, making waving gestures with his hands in an attempt to placate Cosmo. His efforts were not helped by the sandwich in one hand. “It was just a suggestion!”

“A suggestion? Is that what you call it?” Cosmo was making those gestures with his hands that indicated a desire to strangle someone – usually Don. Ignoring the lunch that Don had used to lure him down to the studio, he glared at his best friend. “Not content to sink into the depths of your own private hell, you had to drag me along _with_ you? Et tu, Brute?”

If Cosmo could make jokes, it couldn’t be _that_ bad. Don risked a smile, only to run head-on into a glare. Maybe it _was_ that bad. “Come on, Cosmo. The money’s good?”

“No amount of money in the world would make it worthwhile to be the piano player for - _Miss Lamont_ , how lovely to see you, my dear. You’re looking very fine. Tell me –"

Don whirled, moving to block Cosmo with his own body and pasting a bright smile on his own face. “Hello, Lina. I-"

“I don’t wanna hear it!” Lovely Lina Lamont with her jackdaw voice, was glaring past him at Cosmo. “Since when do _you_ get to pick piano players, Don? You’re an actor! What do _you_ know about music?”

“Quite a bit, actually.” Cosmo had managed to slide smoothly from behind Don and had taken her hand in his, bowing over it with ridiculous theatricality. “Why, when he and I were at the Conservatory together…”

Don watched, bemused, as Cosmo charmed Lina into somewhat wide-eyed submission. Two minutes later, Cosmo was hustling him away from the set, lunch abandoned behind them. “It wears off the minute they remember who they were talking to. Walk _faster_.”

“So I take it you’re less than thrilled with the idea of working for the studio?”

“It’s not the studio, Don. I’d _love_ to work for the studio.” He paused, swinging Don around with an impromptu dance step. “Those stolen moments, kisses behind the sets, why darling, it’d be _perfect_.”

Don started to laugh, unable to help himself. He let Cosmo lead as they danced down the hallway. “It’s Lina, then?”

“Isn’t it always?” Cosmo dipped him and then let go, dropping Don the remaining six inches to the floor. “She’s a harpy with poisoned talons and a voice to match. How you manage to endure an entire picture with her, I will never understand. Have you lost your sense of pitch, perhaps? Or maybe just your mind?”

From the floor, Don made a face at him. “She’s not… that bad,” he said. Even he could hear how feeble the protest was.

“She’s _exactly_ that bad. There are thousands of pretty, well-educated girls out there, with brains, beauty _and_ talent. How did we end up with _her_?”

“Luck?”

“I’d love to stay and chat, but I have to run home and break a few mirrors,” Cosmo said. He grimaced at Don. “Walk under a few ladders, stop by the home for homeless cats and pick up a few black kittens…”

“I’ll tell R.F. you’ll be here in the morning.”

Cosmo stuck his nose in the air and stalked away, leaving Don on the floor, wearing a bright and entirely inappropriate grin.

**

Don’s new house was huge. Cosmo had a few other words for it.

“Grossly over-sized, a waste of good money, an affront against good taste –"

“There’s a wet bar behind the piano.”

"- and entirely suitable to a man of your social stature and prominence. Make mine a –"

Don held up both hands, giving Cosmo a pleading look. “Cosmo, now that you’ve seen it…?"

“No.” Cosmo’s smile never wavered, but there was something angry in the tightened muscles of his jaw.

“Cosmo, I-"

“No.” This time the word was almost gentle. “You’re a big movie star now, Don. You have a _mansion_. Everyone knows who you are and wants your picture or your autograph. We’re not kids anymore. We’re not starving to death together on the road.”

That was the rub, really. The studio had insisted that Don find a better place, somewhere suitable for entertaining. Surrounded by luxury and expense Cosmo had simply shaken his head.

“Cosmo, please?”

“It’s silly to keep carrying on as if we can’t afford more than a single bed.” Cosmo walked past Don to explore the bar himself, refusing to meet his eyes. “It’s been ridiculous for months now.”

"We've been living together for years, Cosmo. It'd be equally ridiculous to stop just because I've suddenly got enough room that we won't actually bump into each other just trying to shave."

"Now that we - you've got enough money for the space, there's no _reason_ to live together."

It wasn't true, but Don wasn’t ready to let go. Cosmo knew it. He kept talking as he pulled out a pair of glasses.

“I can’t move in with you, Don. What would you tell the starlets? ‘I’m sorry, Miss, I can’t seduce you right now. My best friend has a strict nine o’clock bedtime, and we’d be disturbing him’?”

“You’re not just my best friend, Cosmo.”

Cosmo glanced up. “Don’t make it sound like some grand, agonized confession. This isn’t one of your moving pictures, Don.”

“That’s not –"

“You’ve got some elaborate little speech that you’ve been rehearsing for weeks, containing phrases such as ‘no one else like you’ and ‘special place in my life’ and ‘wouldn’t be the same without you’ and even possibly, when I’ve withstood them all, ‘can’t imagine living without you’.”

Don flinched. Cosmo handed him a scotch.

“I’m not abandoning you, Don, and you’re not abandoning me. You’re old enough to sleep without a teddy bear. We both are.”

Don thought about throwing his scotch into Cosmo’s face. Cosmo, long accustomed to Don's reactions when thwarted, moved prudently out of easy reach.

“Why are you making this so difficult?” Don said. There was real hurt in the words and Cosmo winced.

“Because I’m not. You’re the one making this difficult, Don.” He saluted Don with his glass before draining the entire thing. He set it neatly on the edge of the bar. “I hear puppies are grand company.”

Don let him go, scowling after Cosmo as he retreated, the door closing behind him with a heavy thud.

**

Midnight came and went and Cosmo didn’t register the addition of a second body to his oddly empty-feeling bed. After all, it wasn’t one of those narrow planks thinly disguised as a bed that they used to sleep in.

He woke, eventually, to the smell of fresh coffee and bacon and the realization that someone had just tangled their extremely cold feet with his. Only half-awake, he struggled to free himself of the blankets and sit up, only to find himself pinned to the bed by the owner of the cold feet.

“Nnm?” He blinked rapidly, squinting in the dim light. “Don?”

“As I _know_ no one else has been in your bed for the last few years, I’d certainly hope so.”

Don, Cosmo reflected, sounded entirely too cheerful and far too awake. “Gerroff.”

“No.” Don leaned against him, his weight keeping Cosmo more or less in one place.

Managing to achieve coherency at last, Cosmo glared up at him. “What are you _doing_?”

“I was thinking about your little speech yesterday,” Don said. “Your speech about my speech, and I decided that I’d been going about this all wrong.” He smiled brightly, the very picture of reasonable debate. “So I took a page from the man who said that actions speak louder than words and here we are.”

“What?”

“I don’t like sleeping alone, and before you go back to your fictional starlets and how much they’d love to keep me company or attempt to give me nightmares by suggesting that I ask Lina to do the same – I’d like you to consider this.” Don grinned down at him. “The studio wants me to have a great big house in which to throw great big parties and all the newspapers will flock around and take sensational pictures.”

“Already established,” Cosmo said.

“No one said I had to sleep there.”

Cosmo blinked up at him, summoning up a scowl. “Don-"

“You are determined that I should sleep in a lonely bed across town because you don’t want the press getting ‘the wrong idea’.” Don was still grinning. “Think of the loss in movie sales and the death of my career as thousands of young women, heartbroken, stop buying tickets to R.F.’s movies. Hear the gnashing of teeth and the wailing-"

“If this is going to go on for a while, can I at least have coffee and breakfast to fortify me for the hardship to come?”

Don moved just enough to allow Cosmo to sit up. Scrambled eggs and bacon and a large mug of coffee sat on the small table beside the bed, and Cosmo reached for the coffee.

“What if it isn’t?”

Cosmo blinked. “What if what isn’t?”

“What if it isn’t the wrong idea?”

“If this is a lead-in to some new comedy routine, I may give in to temptation and pitch you out the nearest window.”

Don rolled his eyes. “I’m going to sleep here. With you. Every night. Stardom is wonderful and I love the money and the adulation and the hordes of fans – but it is, as they say, not worth losing sleep over.”

“Puppies –"

“I’m really tired of hearing about puppies,” Don said. He took Cosmo’s coffee away.

“Hey!”

Don kissed him.

Don had a great deal of experience in kissing people. Half of America could swear to his skills, having seen him kissing every female in sight in at least a dozen pictures. Cosmo was aware of it, having been forced on more than one occasion to provide an alibi when the girls Don had kissed came looking for him.

First hand was an entirely different experience.

When Don finally let go, Cosmo stared up at him, for once without a single comeback. Yes, they'd been together for years. Yes, he'd always cherished a rather odd affection for Don. Yes, he was aware that despite Don's fondness for lovely women, it was Don who always refused to be separated from Cosmo.

“I’m staying,” Don told him. There was a mulish set to his mouth that said he expected Cosmo to continue to insist that this wasn’t possible or right or any number of other ridiculous arguments.

There was a very long silence before Cosmo finally spoke. “Pancakes.”

“What?”

“Pancakes,” Cosmo said. He reached out to reclaim his coffee. “Tomorrow morning” -and there was a gleam in his eye now to rival Don’s at his worst - “I want pancakes.”

Don stared, nonplussed. “That was… easy.”

“When was the last time I managed to get you to do things my way?” Cosmo asked. “If you’re determined to seduce me with breakfast in bed, the least I can do is insist on an appropriate menu.”

“Appropriate…?”

“Strawberries. As well as pancakes. And orange juice.” Cosmo was smiling, faintly.

Don frowned at him. “You’re not happy.”

“If you’re willing to commit career suicide over my willingness to share a bed, in more ways than one, there’s nothing that says I have to be happy about it,” Cosmo said. His smile widened slightly. “But it’s almost balanced out by your motives, impure and ulterior though they are. Bring me my pancakes” - the smile was by now wide and genuine - “and we’ll talk.”


End file.
